Forgotten Austerities: Kate O’Brien’s Queer Nuns

Abstract

This is a study of the nun as a queer archetype of femininity across Kate O’Brien’s fiction and non-fiction. Alongside characters who are actual nuns, the fiction includes characters who can be described as ‘nun-like,’ especially in their renunciation of sexual desire. In the fiction, this secular renunciation is aligned with religious celibacy as actively chosen and ethically purposeful and situated as similar to artistic creativity. The study argues that O’Brien’s nuns are paradoxical and queer figures, undermining the temporality, class politics and models of human subjectivity central to O’Brien’s own ideological commitments. Attending to these nun figures prompts significant questions about the liberal feminist politics underpinning contemporary O’Brien studies and the prevailing critical reception of O’Brien as an exemplary Irish woman writer.

1. Introduction

Kate O’Brien (1897–1974) has been described as a “Catholic agnostic” (Mentxaka 2011, p. 87).1 This paradoxical formulation underscores O’Brien’s fictional depiction of women religious, and of religious celibacy, which is among the more significant patterns in her novels. Celibacy seems identical with, or adjacent to, sexual puritanism—a phobic rejection of the erotic which for O’Brien characterised the censorious and repressive atmosphere of southern Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s. That identification would seem to be especially true of Catholic religious celibacy, since Catholicism served as the ideological bulwark of that repressive regime. And yet, in O’Brien’s fiction and non-fiction, women’s religious celibacy is figured as actively chosen and ethically purposeful rather than puritanical, aligned with autonomy and artistic creativity rather than abjection and repression. This counter-intuitive conception of religious celibacy structures O’Brien’s discursive nuns—nuns as well as those secular characters who can be described as ‘nun-like’, especially in their renunciation of sexual desire—as figures who destabilise—queer—the conception of liberal individualism to which O’Brien’s fiction is otherwise so committed.

The present article contributes to this Special Issue on Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing by offering a broad survey of this relatively delimited recurring pattern of the nun or the nun-like secular celibate as a queer archetype of femininity across O’Brien’s writing. Namely, by choosing celibacy, O’Brien’s nuns and nun-like figures inhabit a “queer temporality […] in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (Halberstam 2005, p. 1).2 In identifying these trends in her work, the intention here is not to offer a close reading of the distinctive qualities of each text under consideration, but rather to spotlight these patterns of celibacy towards identifying an O’Brien aesthetic which can serve as the foundation for future work. Rather than a comprehensive re-conceptualisation of O’Brien’s work and reception, then, the study makes a more targeted intervention, intended to provoke further reflection on what this specific pattern of queer celibacy in her writing might illustrate about some political problems, as I see it, in the field of O’Brien criticism. Namely, attending to O’Brien’s queer nuns prompts significant questions about the liberal feminist politics underpinning contemporary O’Brien studies, to the extent that these paradoxically queer celibate figures undermine the temporality, class politics and models of human subjectivity central to O’Brien’s own ideological commitments to liberal individualism and Catholicism.

2. O’Brien’s Queer Celibacies: Presentation Parlour

In 1963, O’Brien published Presentation Parlour. She had lived almost four decades as a successful playwright and novelist, moving in artistic and literary circles in London and Dublin, travelling extensively in Europe, living through cataclysmic events of the 1930s and 1940s, including witnessing first-hand the devastation of aerial bombardment in wartime London. Remarkably, however, she chose not to write a conventional autobiography reflecting on her adult life. Instead she focused the narrative entirely on her childhood. Though that is not an entirely accurate description either. Strikingly, what might be considered a formative event in her childhood, her mother’s death when young Kate was aged five, is marginal in the flow of the narrative. Indeed, O’Brien’s parents are relatively minor characters in a narrative structured as a group biography of O’Brien’s five aunts; her mother’s three sisters—written about at greater length and with greater warmth—along with her father’s sister and sister-in-law. As Lorna Reynolds and Bridget Hourican observe, “Two of her mother’s sisters were nuns in the Presentation Convent in Limerick and were devoted, exacting aunts; one of them, according to O’Brien, had something of St Teresa of Avila’s passionate spirituality” (Reynolds and Hourican 2009). Through narrating the life of each aunt in turn, O’Brien writes a family history of two generations of Thornhills (her mother’s family) and O’Briens.

As Eibhear Walshe observes, Presentation Parlour is “more like a blueprint for her fiction rather than any real attempt to explore her past” (Walshe 2006, p. 139). This late text illuminates with unexpected clarity the distinctive contours of O’Brien’s fiction. Firstly, there is the recurring pattern of a nurturing relationship between a girl and an older woman propelling the plot of the girl’s self-formation. Importantly, this supportive older woman is sometimes an aunt but never a mother. However, this is not because the dead mother is a grieved over absence that is simultaneously an overwhelming presence in the story. Surprisingly, given her biography, O’Brien’s fictional mothers are generally alive, if not always physically well. However, they are either ineffectual and self-absorbed—such as Maud Murphy in The Land of Spices (1941)—or obsessively controlling, such as Teresa Mulqueen in The Ante-Room (1934) and that caricature of the monstrous maternal, Hannah Kernahan in The Last of Summer (1943). The deaths of Catherine Archer, in The Land of Spices, and the mother of Mary Lavelle (1936) are exceptions here, though the latter plays a relatively minor role in Mary’s story.

Secondly, there is the late Victorian or Edwardian Irish Catholic bourgeoisie social setting which features so prominently across O’Brien’s fiction but especially in two of her more significant novels, The Ante-Room and The Land of Spices. Revisiting Without My Cloak (1931) or The Flower of May (1953) in light of Presentation Parlour, it becomes apparent that O’Brien added some grandeur and glamour to her fictionalised versions of the Thornhills and O’Briens. In the novels, for instance, we find no sense of the pattern of social relations and distinctive atmosphere of an Irish village or small town, evoked humorously and warmly in her account of her mother’s and aunts’ childhood in Kilfinane, Co. Limerick where they lived above the family shop (again, not a typical location for an O’Brien heroine to find herself domiciled) (O’Brien 1963, pp. 18–27).

Perhaps most importantly, what the memoir shares with her fiction is O’Brien’s conviction that the dynamics of historical development can be clarifyingly distilled in the story of one family.3 In O’Brien, this conception of history is a heroic narrative of the Irish Catholic middle-class emerging from the trauma of famine and dispossession to dynamically forge their destiny, creating the wealth which will insulate them against any reversion to that shameful past. This emphasis on the bourgeoisie as the agents of historical development is at once political and artistic. As a liberal, O’Brien rigorously eschews the Marxist model of class struggle as the motor of history. And despite delivering an appreciative lecture on George Eliot in 1951 (Walshe 2006, p. 130), it is noteworthy that O’Brien never strove for Eliot’s panoramic scale but chose to work on a tightly circumscribed social canvas so that the world beyond that of the middle class rarely has any real weight in her fiction.

Since a revival of critical interest in her work in the 1990s, O’Brien’s commitment to, and skill with, the genre of historical fiction has largely been underplayed by many of her most high profile critics. Instead the critical focus has been concerned predominantly with situating her within literary modernism.4 Ironically, this insistence that O’Brien is a modernist and not a writer of realist genre fiction is underpinned by second-wave feminist critiques of canon formation, while unwittingly reiterating gendered distinctions between the masculine seriousness of modernism and the feminine frivolity of genre ‘middlebrow’ fiction. Moreover, attention to the historical fiction has emphasised O’Brien’s critical depiction of the suffocating oppression placed on its women (and queer men) by that emergent Irish Catholic middle-class with its puritanical sexual hypocrisies. Less emphasis has been placed on the degree to which this critical feminist perspective co-exists in O’Brien’s fiction with an affirmative fascination with what Elizabeth Bowen’s narrator in The Death of the Heart (1938) terms “the authority that comes with possession” (Bowen 1998, p. 291). Just as this determination by many recent critics to situate O’Brien as a modernist underestimates her commitment to nineteenth-century literary realism, their determination to define her politics within the parameters of late-twentieth-century radical feminism5 underestimates her commitment to nineteenth-century liberalism, with all its precarious balancing of ideals about freedom and justice, on one hand, with enforcing the paramount rights of private property on the other. In O’Brien’s worldview, feminism is only achievable in and through a liberal capitalist social order and is imagined as an individual never a collective project.6 Thus, in The Land of Spices even a suffragist campaigner underplays the collective dimension of her own “accidental” activism; arguably, the character’s primary narrative function is less to affirm feminism as such than to act as a foil used to critique cultural nationalism (O’Brien 1970, p. 210).

O’Brien’s is a fiction of dualisms, with Presentation Parlour illustrating an operative dualism in the fiction: a matriarchal principle of relational solidarity and a patriarchal principle of sovereign individualism. The latter principle is embodied in O’Brien’s account of her Thornhill and O’Brien grandfathers, whose enterprising force of will transformed poverty and eviction into wealth and respectability. Clearly, these two provided the pattern when O’Brien created the elder Anthony Considine in Without My Cloak. The former principle is embedded in O’Brien’s artistic choice to structure the memoir as a group biography of the five aunts. But O’Brien’s chosen title for her memoir is neither genealogical nor historical but spatial, referring to a room in the Presentation Convent in Limerick where young Kate visited her aunts, Fan and Mary. This room is vividly evoked and remarkably central in the memoir. Thus, the lengthiest set-piece in the narrative describes a typical Christmas Day, which the O’Brien family spend gathered in this room rather than in their home (O’Brien 1963, pp. 75–85). The parlour is neither a ‘feminine’ private space of family and domestic life, nor a ‘masculine’ public space of business and politics. It is a liminal space. A part of that outer world forbidden to the convent inhabitants that is within the convent walls; a space within the convent but not of it. It is a site of queer temporality; the world of capitalist modernity intersects with the pre-modern medievalism of an enclosed religious order. As the parlour queers space and time, so the nuns who encounter the outer world in that room queer—disrupt, make strange—the conception of liberal individualism which O’Brien’s fiction otherwise endorses. The room is a spatial correlative of that unstable simultaneity of subject positions inhabited by O’Brien’s aunts: Frances Thornhill/Sister Clare; Mary Thornhill/Reverend Mother Mary Margaret.

It is, I believe, worth attending to nuns and nun-like figures in O’Brien’s fiction if we want some productive way of reading her fiction against the grain. Contrary to the views of some of her most eminent recent critics, we will not locate a radical perspective on modern history, and its dominant capitalist-patriarchal-imperialist ideologies, in the liberal political perspectives embedded in O’Brien’s style or in her characters, stories and plots. But we might locate a queerly radical perspective in a most unlikely aspect of her style; a Catholic structure of feeling imbuing her fiction and instantiated most vividly in these nun-figures. Perhaps the queerest archetype in O’Brien’s fiction might not be the lesbian but the celibate nun?

3. Nuns in the Flower of May and the Land of Spices

It is useful to begin by distinguishing between those O’Brien characters who are nuns and those characters who are nun-like. Of the former, Eleanor Delahunt in The Flower of May and Helen Archer in The Land of Spices are most significant.

Like Presentation Parlour, The Flower of May is a late O’Brien work returning to the Edwardian world of her early years. Fanny Morrow is a familiar O’Brien heroine; a young woman on the cusp of adulthood confronting the circumscribed options—marriage and motherhood—available under a bourgeois patriarchal social order. Daughter of a wealthy Dublin family (the descriptions of their large house on Mespil Road modelled on that of O’Brien’s paternal aunt), the novel opens with Fanny at home from her Brussels boarding school for her sister’s wedding and learning of her mother’s decision that she will not be returning to school (O’Brien 1971, p. 9). Thus, this late novel rehearses the dualistic pattern of O’Brien’s fiction: marriage/education; conformity/autonomy; ‘Ireland’/‘Europe.’ To which are added some further variations, notably mother/aunt and religious vocation/artistic vocation. As so often in O’Brien’s fiction—as indeed in James Joyce’s work—the most emotionally compelling and troubling injunctions towards submission to patriarchal authority issue from the figure of maternal love, here embodied in the gently tyrannical Julia Morrow. The novel ends with Julia’s death, but also with Fanny unexpectedly having the freedom to pursue her desire for travel, education, and freedom from parental authority and family responsibility. This is primarily achieved through her maternal aunt, Eleanor. On her sister’s death she becomes sole owner of the Delahunt’s landed estate in County Clare, sets about fulfilling her long-held wish to enter a convent and signs over the estate to Fanny, enabling her to pursue her life as she wishes.

Thus, Eleanor’s religious vocation enables Fanny’s aspiration to be a writer. Again, this association of religious vocation with Romantic conceptions of artistic vocation is familiar from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), where Stephen Dedalus’s childhood identification with Lord Byron mutates into his ambition to become “a priest of the eternal imagination” (Joyce 1993, p. 219); O’Brien’s The Land of Spices can be read as a female, and feminist, revision of Joyce’s Künstlerroman. Moreover, these dualisms are mapped spatially, symbolically and politically on to that distinction between the patriarchal, urban, capitalist space of Mespil Road and the matriarchal, rural, feudal space of Glasalla. In the novel the latter is much romanticised, in an unexpected late-O’Brien turn to Revival-style immersion in the authenticity of the ‘West’ (the mansion looks out on the Atlantic). Just as unexpectedly, given Presentation Parlour’s subsequent sympathetic portrait of the Irish Catholic urban bourgeoisie, this symbolic dualism of Dublin and the West also represents an unexpected turn to a Yeats-style celebration of the ‘aristocratic’ nobility of the landed gentry, whose loyal tenants labour cheerfully so that their superiors have leisure to ennoble the cultural with their refinement and artistic pursuits. (It hardly needs reiterating that this reactionary confection—stubbornly persisting in our culture to a surprising degree—was always wilfully oblivious to the historical reality of agricultural capitalism.)

Eleanor Delahunt remains a relatively underdeveloped character, while Helen Archer is among the more complex characterisations in O’Brien’s fiction.7 O’Brien’s most autobiographical novel, The Land of Spices is set in a convent boarding school near Mellick, O’Brien’s fictionalised version of Limerick, between 1904 and 1914. It is focused on Anna Murphy, from her arrival in the school at the age of six to when she is about to leave for university. From O’Brien’s biography we know that the character of Helen Archer in this novel is based on Anne Blackett, the English-born nun in charge of Laurel Hill school in Limerick during O’Brien’s years as a student there (Walshe 2006, pp. 15–17). Reading the “Aunt Mary” chapter of Presentation Parlour, it is clear that her maternal aunt also provided a model of a figure combining religious piety with worldly skill as a capable, energetic organisational manager. That young Kate was not educated in her aunt’s convent near her family home—and that her aunt’s life, whatever about her personality, is nowhere present in the novel—attests to the rigid division of educational labour in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. ‘Local’ religious orders, such as Presentation and Mercy nuns, tasked with educating and disciplining working- and lower middle-class children; prestigious ‘foreign’ orders, such as Fidèles compagnes de Jésus/Faithful Companions of Jesus, who ran Laurel Hill, responsible for the children of the wealthy.8 Historically, this Order was founded by a French aristocrat in the counter-revolutionary 1820s, a salutary reminder for contemporary literary critics celebrating O’Brien’s liberal ‘European’ values.

Like Eleanor, Reverend Mother fulfils the role of a mentoring figure in an O’Brien Bildungsroman; an older woman enabling the young protagonist in their quest for autonomy and freedom from patriarchal conformity. Thus, Reverend Mother strategically out-manoeuvres Anna’s domineering grandmother to ensure Anna can take up a scholarship that will allow her attend university, turning the grandmother’s own snobbery and subservience to religious authority against her. Along with such practical support, Reverend Mother provides emotional care (Anna feels that she offered the most sustaining support in the depths of grief) while stimulating Anna’s intellectual development through the teaching of literature.

Reverend Mother embodies for Anna a model of a woman occupying a position of authority to inspire and emulate, pursuing her life free from the confinement of marriage and motherhood. Bearing the title ‘Mother’ as marker of position and authority without being a biological mother, but fulfilling the expected nurturing role of a mother more effectively than Anna’s biological mother, the nun queers the structure of patriarchal gender norms. Further, the novel ends with Anna about to leave for university, and Reverend Mother about to leave for Brussels having been elected as head, Mère-Générale, of the Order. Again, that title is a suggestive hybrid. The maternal, conventionally the epitome of femininity, and the martial, conventionally the epitome of masculinity, merged in one body; a body that is biologically female but from which the biological markers of sex have been rigorously effaced by the adoption of a uniform.

Structurally, The Land of Spices is a double-Bildungsroman, with two intertwined plots of youthful formation centred around two protagonists—Anna and Helen. Anna’s Bildung plot develops chronologically in the present (1904–1914), with Reverend Mother as an important figure in that unfolding narrative. Meanwhile, events in the present, including her care for young Anna, prompt Reverend Mother’s extended memories of her youth as Helen Archer, living in Brussels in the 1870s and 1880s and, in particular, her relationship with her father. From Helen’s memories we learn that in the 1860s Henry Archer had suddenly left England and abandoned his promising academic career, to move to the Continent with his wife and baby daughter. It becomes clear that a scandal concerning his sexual relationship with another man may have led to the family’s exile. In contrast with the linear development of Anna’s story in the present, the irregular pattern of Reverend Mother’s memories gives an a-chronological flow to the development of Helen’s narrative.

In a structural parallelism, these ‘Anna’ and ‘Helen’ plots both hinge on an encounter with same-sex eroticism. In the past, accidently seeing her father and his protégé “in the embrace of love” propels eighteen-year old Helen’s decision to become a nun (O’Brien 1970, p. 176). In the present, near the novel’s end, Anna is sitting in the convent garden discussing Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ with Pilar, a fellow pupil. Anna spontaneously apprehends Pilar’s beauty “in a new way […] something that life can be about, something with power to make life compose around it” (O’Brien 1970, p. 272).

On one level, the contrast between these encounters is clear and can be read as allegorising O’Brien’s liberal conception of historical progress. Helen in the past recoiled bitterly from the erotic, renouncing the complexity of human intimacy in favour of the austere certainties of religious celibacy. The narrative directly affirms this style of reading Helen’s vocation within a psychological model of repression and trauma; for all her success as a nun, her experience with her father will “always leave her limping, no matter how she strove with wisdom” (O’Brien 1970, p. 20). For Anna in the present, her encounter with the erotic is a moment of revelation—of epiphany—about her future. Ironically, that she can respond with such open imagination to the Other is, as the double-Bildungsroman structure emphasises, a beneficial consequence of Helen’s influence; we can look towards the future with hope having learnt from the errors of the past.

However this contrast is less clear when we consider that Anna’s response to Pilar’s beauty is less erotic than intellectual; in Anna’s eyes, Pilar becomes a “symbol as complicated as any imaginative struggle in verse […] as a motive in art” (O’Brien 1970, p. 20). It is not so much that erotic desire prompts her to recognise her ambition to be an artist in the future as that she is already perceiving and framing the world as an artist in the present. The narration of this encounter—the mediating function of Milton’s “Lycidas”; the sequence of allusions to art history running through Anna’s mind—emphasises not the erotic but the aesthetic and ethical. The emphasis is less on Anna’s capacity to immerse self in erotic connection with other than her capacity to objectively reframe the erotic as symbolically and ethically meaningfully. Recalling the conjunction of Eleanor’s religious vocation and her niece’s writerly ambitions suggests the possibility of another interpretation of the contrast between Helen’s and Anna’s reactions. In this reading our interpretive focus shifts from one type of narrative, in which moral failure and psychological injury in one generation can engender moral courage and psychological well-being in the next generation. Instead we glimpse a different narrative possibility, in which the celibacy of religious vocation and the sexual expression of artistic creativity present analogous variations on the same quest for purpose.

4. ‘Nun-like’ Figures in Mary Lavelle, the Ante-Room and That Lady

This idea that renouncing sexual desire may be tragic but ethically purposeful, rather than merely symptomatic of repression or neurosis, underpins O’Brien’s characterisation of her notable ‘nun-like’ characters: Agatha Conlon in Mary Lavelle, Ana de Mendoza in That Lady (1946), and Agnes Mulqueen in The Ante-Room. Like the religious nun, these secular characters embody a principled renunciation of sexual desires and pleasures that O’Brien’s fiction situates as heroic and ethically creative. In a complex manoeuvre, their ethical motivation is very clearly distinguished from any form of submission to external moral authority, such as adherence to Catholic moral teaching, yet the characters are insistently associated with a religious, specifically Catholic, atmosphere, affect and temporality. Hence these characters are ‘nun-like’.

In Mary Lavelle, Agatha’s passion for Mary is transgressive in the same way as Mary’s shared passion with the married Juanito, such that categories like ‘homosexuality’ and ‘adultery’ become entirely redundant. In O’Brien’s fiction, perversity is not defined within the framework of natural and unnatural acts, provided by moral theology, nor the structures of homo-hetero definition provided by sexology. Instead, perversity is an ethical orientation rather than a psychological category. Illicit sexual desires are perverse, and potentially utopian, in their waywardness, their divergence from and incompatibility with reality. Such perversity imagines the subversion of an ethical framework, while simultaneously affirming the value of that framework. Their sexual longings will cause pain to Agatha, Mary and Juanito and to others, and O’Brien’s fiction reiterates that this pain must be confronted.

In her narration of illicit sexual desires, O’Brien draws less on Freudian psychoanalysis than on an older Augustinian idea. As Dollimore (1991) demonstrates, our modern category of sexual perversion, inherited from late nineteenth-century sexology and twentieth-century psychanalytical theory, has compacted within it older theological and political connotations. In its simplest theological meaning, pervert functions as an antonym of convert; that is, turning towards or away from God. From this sense of directional activity derives a teleological conception of perversity as a wilful deviation from an established and natural trajectory. But why, as Dollimore asks, should deviation from the right path in itself be considered evil? One answer, Dollimore suggests, is that such deviation is politically subversive as it demystifies what is ideologically framed as ‘natural.’ Deviation from orthodoxy moves us towards grasping the fixed reality of social and ideological structures as dynamic and contingent; a potential insight that Dollimore describes as “the path we thought we were on naturally, or by choice, we are in fact on by arrangement” (Dollimore 1991, p. 106). Glimpsing that possibility opens the potential to reveal “alternative ways to alternative futures” (Dollimore 1991, pp. 106–7). Along with being teleological, the concept of perversity is also dialectical, which, Dollimore argues, is also derived from Christian theology. If perversion is a deviation from the natural and the good, then perversion must also originate within the natural and good. In Augustine’s theodicy—the justification of the existence of evil within a divinely created order—evil is at once the antithesis of God and yet intrinsic to our fallen human nature which was created in God’s likeness. As a wilful turning away from God, and from good, perversity is above all a perversion of the free will with which God endowed human beings (Dollimore 1991, pp. 131–47).

Agatha’s ‘confession’ of guilt about her feelings for Mary is underscored by this logic. Having declared that she desires Mary “the way a man would … I can never see you without—without wanting to touch you,” Agatha observes that “it’s a sin to feel like that.” She goes on to explain that “lately I’ve been told explicitly about it in confession. It’s a very ancient and terrible vice” (O’Brien 1980a, p. 285). That she laughs “softly” while recounting this judgement emphasises her awareness of the ironic juxtaposition between the delicate, humane scale of her feelings for Mary and the ponderous melodrama of this ascription. Agatha, in other words, draws a subtle distinction between her desires as such and the theological nomination of them as sinful. She recognises the framework in which these desires are sinful, while reiterating that her renunciation of her love for Mary is not determined by this framework but by her own ethical agency.

The crucial factor within Mary’s Bildung narrative is not whether she does or does not reciprocate Agatha’s feelings, but her realisation of the essential similarity between Agatha’s position and her own. As the love between her and Juanito is impossible because he is married, so is Agatha’s because it is unrequited. Mary realises this as she and Agatha sit together outside a church, just after Agatha has declared her feelings. Watching “the baize door swing and swing again in the porch of San Geronimo,” Mary thinks of the people “going in incessantly to pray, as Agatha did so often, as she did, as Juanito too, perhaps. Seeking strength against the perversions of their hearts and escape from fantastic longings” (O’Brien 1980a, p. 297). As the rhythm of O’Brien’s sentence establishes an equivalence between the three characters, the meaning of their common ‘perversion’ is clearly no longer defined by the binary logic of heterosexual and homosexual or ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural.’ Instead, their desires are perverse in their waywardness, their divergence from and incompatibility with reality. And Agatha’s ‘nun-like’ quality is here amplified through Mary’s epiphany being ‘framed’ by the church door (Cronin 2012, pp. 87–98).

Set in sixteenth-century Spain, O’Brien’s That Lady is, as she wrote in her foreword, “an invention arising from reflection on the external story of Ana de Mendoza and Philip II of Spain” (O’Brien 1985, p. xiv). An enormously wealthy aristocratic widow, de Mendoza was imprisoned by the Spanish king for conspiring with his secretary, Antonio Perez. In O’Brien’s version, Ana refuses the King’s order to end her love affair with Perez and, in a Gothic twist, Philip then orders her to be confined to a walled-up room in one of her palaces where she dies after thirteen years. In Ana’s climactic confrontation with Philip, O’Brien explicitly politicises her stance; Ana refuses the king’s order while also pleading with him to govern his kingdom more attentively and effectively. The outcome is tragic but also heroic. Written in wartime London, O’Brien’s novel offers a powerful allegory of the individual body as an embattled site of resistance against the oppressive force of modern power.

While Ana is a victim of despotism, the novel reiterates her agency. She could have very easily avoided her terrible fate since submission to Philip’s order would have cost her little. When refusing Phillip’s order to end her love affair, the focalised narration shows us that Ana is not motivated by the strength of her passion for Perez. On the contrary, she finds the affair disappointing and is about to end it anyway. But while pledging her loyalty to Philip as her king, she insists on preserving a private sphere on which he can make no claim and where only the writ of her own moral judgement can run. Ana’s similarity with O’Brien’s other nun-like figures lies in this severe commitment to an ideal, pursued even while knowing that it will mean banishment from human society. Ana’s literal banishment echoes the chosen exile of a nun in the confined space of the convent, while also echoing the suffering of religious martyrdom; that is, a form of suffering somehow redeemed by purposefulness.

At the conclusion to The Ante-Room, Agnes Mulqueen insists that she is renouncing her passion for her brother-in-law not because their desire breaches moral and social codes but out of love for, and loyalty to, her sister. Again, it is characteristic of O’Brien’s ironic ambivalence about such gestures that it leads to tragedy, even while affirming the value of Agnes’s ethical rigour (O’Brien 1980b, pp. 258–73). The novel is divided into three sections: The Eve of All Saints, The Feast of All Saints and The Feast of All Souls. This structure encodes a rigid conformity placed grid-like over the vitality of human experience and thus serves as an allegory of the cultural and political homogeneity of the post-partition Irish state at the time O’Brien was writing. These dates in the calendar of Catholic devotion coincide with the pagan festival of Halloween, that time when the boundary between the world of the living and the dead is porous. In the novel, Agnes’s mother, Teresa, is dying slowly of cancer and hovers in this space. Thus O’Brien’s queer temporality fuses the secular disenchanted epistemology and temporality underpinning the conventions of literary realism—this is a historical novel set in the 1880s—with the sacred epistemology and temporality of religious faith. This fluid, cyclical time of ritual chimes with human experiences (grief, loss, vulnerability, love) beyond rational calculation. O’Brien locates the motive force for those utopian desires expressed though religious faith—the longing for intimations of another sphere, other possibilities—in human suffering and the need for solace. Her fiction profoundly acknowledges, even while being deeply sceptical of, the comforting illusions of such faith; her nuns and nun-like figures, such as Agnes, are the focal points of O’Brien’s ironizing ambivalence.

5. Conclusions

In 1951, O’Brien published Teresa of Avilla, in a series by a London publisher titled “Personal Portraits.” This idiosyncratic choice of subject for the series indicates O’Brien’s abiding fascination with women religious, as well as with sixteenth-century Spain. O’Brien narrates Teresa as an archetypal early modern subject, in whom we can glimpse a nascent liberal individualism historically emerging. Teresa’s human ordinariness is underscored: her conviviality and charm; her gift for friendship, especially, as O’Brien notes, her passionate friendships with woman; even her skill at cooking. At the same time though, in common with O’Brien heroines, she is an exceptional individual. As a daughter of minor nobility she is literarily an aristocrat, but more importantly she is a spiritual and intellectual aristocrat in the Yeatsian sense.

As O’Brien explains in the introduction, her study focuses on Teresa not as a saint but as a “woman of genius” (O’Brien 1951, p. 9). What O’Brien means by this term remains opaque, not helped by asserting that there has only been two other such women in European history—Sappho and Emily Brontë (O’Brien 1951, p. 11). In O’Brien’s account, Teresa’s genius was directed outward, into the practical and political project of founding a new religious Order structured around a spiritually and physically demanding Rule which she constructed. To do this meant breaking her own strict rules about cloistered life, since she regularly travelled to found new convents. This dynamic figure, busy organising and negotiating with Kings, Bishops and Popes, is a protype of Helen Archer and Aunt Mary (or at least the version of Mary Thornhill we find in Presentation Parlour, where O’Brien makes the comparison explicit). Arguably Teresa is also a protype of the Thornhill and O’Brien grandfathers, those patriarchs asserting their will on the world albeit through the pursuit of property and profit rather than religious reform.

As Teresa’s volumes of autobiographical writing demonstrate, her genius was also directed inward through a self-conscious critical interrogation of the self that is distinctly modern. O’Brien reflects on how her reconstruction of Teresa’s early life depends on Teresa’s account in her autobiographical writing; that is, what we know is mediated through the older Teresa narrating her life around a teleological purpose of which the younger Teresa was unaware. As a woman writer striving to create a form in which to narrate feminine consciousness, Teresa is a protype of O’Brien and her fictional avatars such as Anna Murphy and Fanny Morrow.

However, as O’Brien explains, in her writing Teresa’s exploration of consciousness is narrated through the distinctly non-modern format of a dialogue between herself and Jesus, to whom she refers, in feudal fashion, as “His Majesty.” O’Brien observes that Jesus’s brusque and impatient tone in this dialogue makes him sound a lot like Teresa, and perhaps the joke reveals her own anxious uncertainty about quite what to do with this strange and unsettling material. For all that it might look familiarly modern, Teresa’s purpose in turning her gaze inward was never self-knowledge or self-understanding but self-abnegation. She was cultivating a mystical, ecstatic religious practice, which demanded the infliction of violence on the body, and even while apparently creating a women-centred space in the convent her actual objective was to create the conditions for an intense isolation that this practice required. Creating a new religious Order, Teresa was actually returning to the original medieval Rule on which the Carmelites, the Order to which she initially belonged, was founded but which had altered, and in her view degenerated, over the centuries.

In a counter-intuitive move, O’Brien compares Teresa and her contemporary Martin Luther. Teresa loathed him as the enemy of Catholicism, but O’Brien emphasises their similarity. Intellectually rigorous thinkers, courageously refusing conformity and determined to reform Christianity. Again, O’Brien figures them as prototypically modern in their questing assertion of individuality and striving to remake not just the Church but the self. Except, as O’Brien notes in a description that could perhaps apply to her own worldview, Teresa “was a woman, and a conservative; her impulse for reform looked backward to the old forgotten austerities—not forward to their overthrow and dismissal” (O’Brien 1951, p. 68).

Like her version of Teresa of Avilla, O’Brien’s nuns are paradoxical figures. For the young protagonists of O’Brien’s Bildungsromane these are enabling foremothers and feminist exemplars, exercising authority in women-centred institutions. These figures are associated particularly with the emancipatory potential of education and with a nurturing solidarity that stands in opposition to the suffocating demands of heterosexual marriage. These women inhabit spaces that are literally separate from the patriarchal order, while inhabiting an identity that confounds the gendered binaries of that order. At the same time, women religious embody submission to patriarchal authority, such that their example must be repudiated to attain emancipation—notably, in the novels becoming a nun is invariably associated with the older generation. O’Brien’s novels were philosophically opposed to moral rigidity and sexual puritanism, specifically as those manifest in the dominant politics of post-partition Ireland. In reality, nuns were among the institutional agents of this sexually repressive and cruelly oppressive dominant. Yet in the novels the renunciation of sexual desires and pleasures associated, literarily or figuratively, with religious celibacy is positioned as heroic and ethically purposeful rather than neurotic, and aligned with the autonomy and creativity of artistic expression. The nuns embody that ideal of an ethical liberal individualism which the novels strive to imagine. But they embody this ideal precisely to the degree that they have immersed their individuality in the collective endeavour of religious life. They embody O’Brien’s modern ideal of autonomy, while inhabiting a radically depersonalised, self-abnegating and archaic mode of living thoroughly at odds with the rational temporality of modernity. In short, O’Brien’s fascination with nuns led her to place at the centre of her fiction figures who queerly subvert her own ideological commitments to a liberal, capitalist model of history and consciousness.